Tinujei: los Triquis de Copala

Abstract

This book is a second-edition reprint of the 1971 classic ethnography of the Triqui people, an indigenous peasant population of some 25,000 who inhabit the Mixteca region in the northwestern part of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The new edition, featuring the addition of a short biography of García Alcaraz, has been produced to honor this well-known Mexican anthropologist, who died in 1995.García Alcaraz started working as a priest in 1967 in the town of San Juan Copala, in the heart of Triqui territory, and was deeply committed to the defense of the Triqui in their confrontation with the Mexican state and other forces complicit in the group’s marginalization. Even today there is a notable dearth of ethnography on the Triqui; this work, though dated, remains one of the most comprehensive accounts. The book attempts, in the customary indigenista ethnographic style of the 1970s, to render a thorough description of the Triqui through careful attention to various domains of their social life, especially in the economic realm. But García Alcaraz goes beyond most ethnographies by providing us with an unusually meticulous account of the Triqui social and political reality at the time, in addition to rare historical records and documents shared with him by Triqui leaders.Tinujei, meaning “my brother” (hermano mío) in the Triqui language, refers to a central focus of the book—the ethic of solidarity and communalism among the inhabitants of the town of San Juan Copala. Comprising four distinct communities, including Copala, the Triqui zone is spread over roughly 500 square kilometers in the Mixteca, one of poorest regions of Oaxaca state. The Triqui are small-scale peasant producers, growing corn, coffee, and some fruit and beans. The harsh environment, cool and arid, is limiting, forcing the Triqui to depend for their survival on participation in regional exchange markets and, indirectly, on the sale of their coffee in national and international markets. As one of Mexico’s major exports, coffee is both an important source of income for the Triqui and a source of their exploitation. García Alcaraz explains that the purpose of his study is to describe the mechanisms and social relations which operate internally within the group and in their contact with the larger society. The materialist perspective he adopts is heavily influenced by the world-systems theory fashionable at the time the book was written; thus García Alcaraz situates the Triqui in a global context of expropriation and exploitation within the global capitalist system, at same time launching a barbed critique of the models of “development” implemented by the Mexican state.Like so many indigenous towns in Oaxaca, the Triqui in Copala have been embroiled throughout history in conflicts with neighboring groups—both indigenous Mixtecans and mestizos—over land. The Triqui’s struggle to conserve their territory provides a central theme of the ethnography. Land is not only their means of subsistence but the source of family and group identity, and it is endowed with sacred value. The Triqui have a long tradition of closing themselves off to the outside: their indefatigable efforts to defend themselves from external incursion have also meant a violent history, characterized by strong opposition to any type of relation with mestizo society (resistance first to domination by the Spanish and later, in the nineteenth century, to local caciques); in the more contemporary period this opposition has taken the form of armed resistance to assimilation into the dominant national cultural and political project of the Mexican state.With this struggle in the background, García Alcaraz constructs an account of the central domains of Triqui life. The book is divided into five main chapters. Chapter 1 presents the Triqui as a highly exploited, marginal indigenous people within a larger matrix of relations of production with other social groups at the local and national levels. Chapter 2 focuses on coffee production as the point of entry to other aspects of the economic sphere of Triqui society; it contains a careful inventory of the ecological zone they inhabit, their material culture (dress, houses, tools), crops cultivated, and work patterns, including their participation in local markets, and migration. García Alcaraz concentrates particularly on the relationships the Triqui are forced to establish with intermediaries, who buffer their contact with political and economic centers by acting as the central agents in their exploitation. Chapter 3 examines the internal fabric of Triqui society, including kinship and compadrazgo relations and customs, and the nature of social differentiation. The extended family is emphasized as the nucleus of social organization, which is integrated through gradations of kinship ties, these in turn being isomorphic with broader geographic divisions. The institution of the communal work of tequio is another mode of economic exchange and just one of several customs operating to foster social integration. Chapter 4 attempts to sketch the basic elements of the Triqui’s worldview, language, and religious and ceremonial life, including their connection with traditional healing practices. Finally, in chapter 5, García Alcaraz offers a short synthesis of the material through a brief historical outline of the relationship of the Triqui of Copala with the dominant society in which they have been immersed.The abundance of carefully collected data in the book is supported by several tables, which supply information ranging from kinship terms to the exact prices of coffee in 1971–72. García Alcaraz’s rather orthodox materialist emphasis on ecological adaptation can be somewhat reductive: women, for example, figure in the ethnography almost exclusively in terms of their symbolic association with the land and their direct role in social reproduction. Nevertheless, García Alcaraz’s ethnography shows fastidious attention to detail, allowed by his having close contact with the Triqui for a period of time not normally possible for anthropologists. The result is a sensitive work which, despite its theoretical biases, creates, almost by default, a vivid account of Triqui life. The new edition is without the photographs of the original, and the bibliography (as in the first edition) is minimal, yet it contains transcriptions of various rare documents from the colonial period pertaining to land tenure, in addition to a “Codice Triqui” and “Stories and Legends of Copala.”Though much of this ethnography’s information is now obsolete, its global analytic framework is still timely. Today, almost 30 years after this study was first published, the Triqui’s struggle continues. However, they are now global actors more than ever, migrating in large numbers to California for tomato harvesting and defending their rights through participation in binational and national indigenous rights organizations including, since 1989, the Unified Movement for the Triqui People (MULT), one of Oaxaca’s best-known and strongest indigenous rights groups. For historians this work’s appeal probably lies in the finely detailed and precise ethnographic study of one of the most dynamic and least described indigenous groups in Oaxaca.

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